Nicholas of Cusa was born in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 1401, in the German city of Kues, to a “middle-class” boatman and vineyard owner. As a young man Nicholas was influenced by the “Modern Piety” (devotio moderna), a reform movement that had begun in the late fourteenth century and spread throughout Germany and parts of France and Italy. This movement stressed several things which were, at the time, very controversial and offensive to the established hierarchical authority structure of the Medieval Church. First was a stress on the “simple” Christian life, which the advocates of the Modern Piety thought had been lost after the “Golden Age” of the primitive Church. Second was the importance of not relying merely upon external aids to salvation, such as the Church and her sacramental system, but of focusing seriously on a genuine “interior” spiritual life. Third was a conviction that the mysteries of Christianity were available not merely to intellectuals but to common people as well. Fourth was a stress on intense emotions regarding the suffering of Christ and one’s relationship with Him. In these ways, the devotio moderna had significant connections to the outlook of St. Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas a Kempis. As well, it was a major impulse in the founding of the influential Brethren of the Common Life.

From the age of 16, Nicholas studied at the University of Heidelberg, and took his doctorate in canon law (doctor decretorum) in 1423. Subsequently he studied philosophy and theology at the University of Cologne. These studies prepared him for the great work he was destined to perform in the service of Christ’s Church. At that time the Church was mired in the destructive after effects Western Schism. The Schism, based on the total breakdown of the system of papal government, had consumed the resources and strength of European Christianity for four decades and had only recently been healed by the actions of the Council of Constance (1414-1418). However, even as Nicholas was completing his education, a renewed battle was shaping up between the two major visions of ecclesiastical government which had fought each other during the Schism, namely, papalism and conciliarism. Some of the major principles of this debate hearkened back to the ninth century with the disputes of Hincmar of Rheims with Pope Nicholas I, while others had been slowly hammered out in the centuries-long debates of the two groups of canon lawyers known as the Decretists and Decretalists.

The Council of Constance had issued two major decrees, Haec Sancta (April 6, 1415) and Frequens (October 9, 1417), both of which limited the power of the Papal Monarchy. Papal power had heretofore been nearly illimitable, and the Schism had showed that it was a very serious danger to the peace and stability of Christendom. Although Constance had healed the Schism, it had failed, for various reasons, to implement its other major purpose: that of reforming the Church “in head and members” (in capite et membris). A succession of popes had capitalized on this failure, starting with the one elected by Constance itself, Martin V (r. 1417-1431). Constance’s decree Frequens had specified that General Councils should be held on a specific timetable (five years after Constance, again seven years after that, and then at an interval of every ten years). Despite their continuing pretensions to be absolute rulers, accountable to no one on earth, the popes for the rest of the fifteenth century and into the middle of the sixteenth would live under constant agitation from antipapalist forces rallying around Constance’s decree Haec sancta. They would also live under substantial pressure to adhere to Constance’s decree Frequens.

Pope Martin V felt this pressure acutely, because it cut deeply into the presumed political and ecclesiastical sovereignty of the papacy and created a serious risk of an outside power possessing the ability to regulate the feudal-financial affairs of the pope. The fedual powers of the papacy included the increasingly onerous interference of the Church’s judicial system into the business of the civil judicial system. This interference of the spiritual power in the affairs of the civil power constituted a fundamental violation of the central principle of the Medieval political order, known as Gelasian dualism. That principle, rooted in the epochal work of Augustine in his City of God and formulated as an actual principle of political theology by Gelasius I, bishop of Rome, in 494 A.D., stated that Christendom was made up of two distinct entities, the spiritual and the civil. The two entities were distinct from each other, and independent of each other in their own spheres of operation. However, if their jurisdictions ever overlapped (as they often would in the Middle Ages), the two entities were supposed to constructively cooperate with each other to resolve difficulties.

The rise of the Papal Monarchy system of government as a result of the Investiture Contest of the late eleventh to early twelfth century had set the papacy on a course in which it thought of itself as being totally dominant over the civil sphere as well as over the spiritual sphere. From the time of the Investiture Contest forward, the popes thought of themselves as not just the heads of the universal Church, but also as the final authority over earthly political powers. Consequently, as Gelasius I himself had warned against when he formulated the principle of governmental dualism, the popes frequently allowed their civil concerns to overpower their spiritual concerns. This mired the papacy increasingly in worldliness, and over time, much protest was raised against it from other quarters of Christendom. Though in theory the universal lords of the world, the popes were in actual practice frequently contradicted by civil rulers, and their authority was subjected to intensive scrutiny and debate within the Christian academic world. Nicholas of Cusa was one of many heirs to this critical scrutiny of papal power, and he would put his education in these matters to excellent use challenging the excesses of the Papal Monarchy in the fifteenth century.

Another issue of deep concern to the pope was his “privilege” (privilegium) of dispensing with benefices and indulgences for purposes of filling the coffers of the Papal States which had been depleted by the papacy’s usurpation of and widespread use of temporal power throughout Europe. The popes were immersed in secular business, not least of which was the waging of wars either to gain or to recover territory and other possessions, and because they were feudal lords as well as spiritual governors, the popes could not let their temporal pretensions go. Conciliarism, the theory that the highest judicial power in the Church was the General Council acting directly in Christ’s Name and with powers that overruled all others, represented a serious threat to the papacy’s claims of both spiritual and civil sovereignty. Accordingly, Martin V spent fourteen years after his election by the Council of Constance carefully, but deviously, politicking against conciliarism. He was successful in manipulating affairs so that the papacy remained largely unchallenged until the Council of Basel was convened, per Frequens, in July of 1431.

Nicholas of Cusa had been elevated in 1430 to the position of chancellor for a local noble, Ulrich von Manderscheid. In this capacity, he went to the Council of Basel in February of 1432 for the purpose of defending his lord’s claim on the archbishopric of Trier, one of the seven electorates of the Holy Roman Empire. Shortly after his arrival, he was incorporated into the council’s administrative body, specifically into the Committee on Faith. From this position he would become embroiled in the council’s bitter dispute with Martin V’s successor, Pope Eugenius IV (r. 1431-1447) over issues of the council’s authority relative to the pope’s. Eugene had tried peremptorily to dissolve the Basel assembly and transfer it to an Italian site, partly so that he could more easily attend it himself and partly because representatives of the embattled Greek Church had contacted the West and asked for a more convenient location for a council to discuss reunification of the two bodies, sundered since 1054.

However, since the Council of Basel had already formally organized itself and renewed Constance’s decree Frequens, connecting its authority to that of the earlier Council, it rejected the papal bull of dissolution when it arrived two months after Eugenius issued it. In its next session Basel renewed Haec sancta as well, adding further insult to the pope’s pretensions. In the midst of this controversy, Nicholas arrived at Basel. A subcommittee of the Committee on Faith in which he participated in August of 1433 judged Eugenius’s bull of dissolution to be invalid and no restriction on the authority of the Council. This substantially raised the pressure on the pope, and Eugenius then declared conciliarism a heretical ecclesiology. The Council, however, ignored his pretentious rumblings and continued on with its business.

A brief respite from the conflict was introduced in October of 1433 when the Emperor Sigismund arrived at the Council and successfully arbitrated the dispute so that Eugenius appeared to give in to the conciliarist program. Though at that time he formally declared the council legitimate from the time of its inception and formally revoked his earlier bulls against it, informally, as is shown by his private letters, he did not recant his position that conciliarism was heresy. At about this time, Nicholas wrote his masterpiece, the Catholic Concordance, which elaborately argued from the very nature of the universe itself that General Councils are superior to the Roman Pontiff. A few citations from this work will be of interest here.

No rational person can doubt that a council which represents the church has power over the papacy to direct its occupant in accordance with the needs of the church which is greater than the decision of one man concerning a papal office which has been given to him in the name of the church and for its benefit [The Catholic Concordance, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pg. 123]

We see that by the grace of God the Council of Basel has now been strengthened in a marvelous way—although at the beginning it was convulsed by doubt and fluctuation—, and this can come only from God who is lasting truth. Therefore let us firmly believe that all its actions from the beginning were inspired by the Holy Spirit….The Holy Spirit undoubtedly inspired these actions so that if perhaps the pope wished to resist, there would be no doubt as to the universality of the council. On these three matters there has already been a definitive and immutable decree in the Council of Constance. And so by divine inspiration the Council [of Basel ] concerned itself with this before any difficulty arose.

…If there is no doubt that the Holy Spirit dictated this syllogism to this holy Council, what need is there to doubt or dispute further whether the pope can be bound by the reform decrees so that he cannot contravene them? [The Catholic Concordance, pp.139-140]

Echoing the earlier conciliarists Pierre d’Ailly, Jean Gerson, John of Paris, and William Durandus the Younger, Nicholas agreed that the power of the General Council is directly from Christ, not indirectly through the pope, that in times of emergency the Council may conduct itself without the consent of the pope, and that it may even remove the pope from office for heresy and incompetent governorship.

In the context of a papalist system that was entrenched in Christendom and which claimed to be traditional and argued that conciliarism was a “novelty,” Nicholas of Cusa’s theory of conciliarism was everywhere marked by moderation, not radicalism. He affirmed that the papacy is part of the divinely-willed scheme of ecclesiastical government, that it possessed significant power and primacy in its own right, and that it was not merely the creature of the General Council. His basic theory was “triadic,” meaning that it was organized according to threes. Nicholas argued that there are nine choirs of angels and nine heavenly spheres above. Below, the world is divided into rational, sensate, and vegetative. Just as man is body, soul, and spirit, so too is the church made up of sacraments, priethood, and the faithful.

Through in-depth analyses of many historical records and principles of canon law, Nicholas argued several key points. First was that the See of Peter is the head of the Church because of the “consent of the Church” (consensus ecclesiae). Second, when the pope wants to make a law he must consult the Church represented in a council. Third, that corporate realities are more important than individual ones, and so, as the early conciliarists had said, “the health of the whole body is the supreme law” as over against any laws made by only the head. Fourth, that following from that the “greater and sounder part” (maior et sanior pars) of a council cannot err in its decisions about doctrine. Fifth, that “positive law” (the law on the books) is not absolute. Sixth, that a General Council may be distinguished from a pseudo-council (conciliabulum) by means of an intricate theory of “representation.” For Nicholas, representation included a graded hierarchy of presiding officials (praesides) and other representatives (legati) of various groups, including ordinary laymen. This last was an astounding claim at this point in history, so it is noteworthy that Nicholas takes steps to distance himself from the similar-sounding, but more democratic and revolutionary theory of Marsilius of Padua (1270-1343).

Nicholas’ arguments for conciliarism in the Church are, as it turns out, also arguments for the proper ordering of temporal society. Like most theologians of the Middle Ages Nicholas was aware of and tried to uphold the principle of governmental dualism. This led him to write, against the pretensions of the papacy for the previous several centuries to have the power to control the temporal sphere as well as the spiritual, that the Holy Roman Emperor is in his sphere of government the equivalent of the pope in his sphere of government. In Nicholas’ day the ideological construct of “universal empire” generally speaking, and of the “universal empire of the Romans” particularly, was losing ground to rising forces of nationalism and constitutionalism. Nevertheless, Nicholas argued that the emperor is both the protector of the Church (advocatus ecclesiae) and that even nations of Christendom such as France and England which do not recognize imperial authority should submit to the emperor’s administration of conciliar decrees. This is due to the fact the emperor is, in the temporal sphere, the “minister of God” and the “vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.” As Nicholas saw it, the Christian society (societas Christiana) was being rent by two forces: excessive centralization in the papacy, and excessive decentralization in the empire. Sadly, his cogent type of thinking about how to reform these matters was not to be followed, and the problems he saw would, by the next century, become excerbated to the point where only a thoroughgoing Reformation could hope to fix them.

Returning to an earlier theme, Nicholas’ moderation, designed to threat a path through many conflicting claims, is in keeping with the methodology he learned in his training as a canon lawyer. That method, following the father of Medieval canon law, Gratian of Bologna, tried to resolve contradictory texts by harmonizing them into a middle position (medium concordantiae). It is his moderation, in fact, which provides the biggest clue to the dramatic reversal of his loyalty which took place in May of 1437. Although he propounded the theory that conciliar business should proceed through disagreements toward a goal of reconciliation through what he called a “coincidence of opposites,” he was unable to continue following the conciliarist program when a radical faction at Basel took control of the council. This faction, which became the majority, rejected Nicholas’ idea of “divided sovereignty” in which the pope and the Council shared power and added mutually to each other’s credibility.

As pressure mounted on the West to meet the Greek representatives for serious talks about reunification, and as Basel came to be virtually controlled by a group which wanted not merely to reform the papacy but to reduce it to a creature of a perpetual series of councils, Nicholas abandoned the assembly and became a champion of Pope Eugenius’ cause. When Eugenius transferred the council to Ferrara in 1437, Nicholas and several other moderates left Basel to its own devices and threw their weight into the reforming and reunification efforts in Ferrara. So great was the authority of Nicholas that his labors for the papacy would later provoke Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II (r. 1458-1464), to call him “the Hercules of the Eugenians.”

In succeeding centuries, much has been made by papalists of Nicholas’ seeming abandonment of the conciliar cause and supposed embracing of the papalist one, but a careful reading of the history and of Nicholas’ own total program argues for the conclusion that it has been much ado about nothing. Despite his seeming “defection” to papalism after the radical faction took over the Council of Basel, one must note that Nicholas continued over the years to support the general ideas behind conciliar theory, especially the principles of the primacy of the “consensus of the Church” and the lawfulness of the Church as a whole to withdraw from obedience to the pope if he begins to threaten the health of the “greater and healthier” part of the body.

The Council of Ferrara soon became the Council of Florence due to a hasty move to protect the assembly from brigands. Ferrara’s overly-confident reunification decree, Laetentur Coeli , issued in 1439, was almost instantly rejected by the Greek authorities in Constantinople because it conceded too much to that which the Greek Church had so resolutely opposed for centuries: unfettered papal primacy. Four years later, Constantinople was sacked by the Muslim armies, putting an end to a thousand years of Eastern Christian civilization. Nicholas was made a cardinal in 1449 by Eugenius IV’s successor, Pope Nicholas V (r. 1447-1455), and it is perhaps ironic that as a cardinal he received a written call for a new General Council nailed to his door by conciliarists in 1451. In 1450 he became the Bishop of Brixen in Tyrol, which because of the feudalization of the Church at this time brought him into some unfortunate territorial conflicts with the Duke of Tyrol, Sigismund. As late as 1460, only four years before his death, he could still be found advocating a “representative” form of government for the Church, putting the lie to papalist caricatures of the reasons for and implications of his “papalist reversal” two decades earlier.

Other than the Catholic Concordance, Nicholas of Cusa is known for his brilliant work On Learned Ignorance, published in 1439, and an oddly ecumenical (for the times) book called On Peace in Faith, published in 1453. Nicholas’ contributions to conciliar theory also pre-saged some developments in what we now think of as “Modern” constitutional theory. This is particularly seen in his theory that representation is not, as had often previously been the case, a case of one party autonomously impersonating another, but instead a case of one party being consciously chosen by another to stand in its place. Nicholas is largely responsible for moving Christian political discourse at this time more solidly away from monarchichal absolutism and further along towards a “separation of powers” doctrine. Given that so much is made of the so-called “death of conciliarism” in the fifteenth century, it is ironic to find Nicholas’ work quoted approvingly by the sixteenth century papalist Cardinal Bellarmine.

Nicholas of Cusa died in Rome in 1464. It is fitting that such a brilliant Christian scholar should be physically remembered in his own home town of Kues by a library (many of whose books bear annotations in his own hand) and a home for the aged, which still stand today as possibly the oldest private foundations in Europe.